an electric eel that can not only generate but store electricity and is supposedly millions of years old.

Right, at what point in this eels evolution did it acquire the ability to make electricity?How did it survive without this defense mechanism?If there was some other way it survived why did evolution even bother to electrify this creature .

There are various scientific definitions of species, the most commonly accepted one involving the ability to create nonsterile offspring.

This makes sense if one is limited by physical definitions, but I think many on the intelligent design side, whether they realize it or not, define the species as a sort of kind or something that is a shadow of a form or something. hence the acceptance of various dogs, even drastically different ones, but not something that isn’t quite a dog or some other creature.

My cat is a cat. It is itself and a representative, a manifestation, an individual expression of catness. Similarly, you and I are each unique revelations of what it means to be human, possessing to our own degree those attributes that define us. There exists a reality to living things, a wholeness that goes beyond the particulars of their physical structure and what they do. Their being includes what we divide into the physical body and its sensitive aspect, it’s perceptions, feelings and behaviour. The shadow is more the ideas that we project onto the organism; kitty is what it is, being a cat. Maybe like my cat is similar to but different from other cats, maybe felines and canines are different examples of the same thing, but exhibiting different clusters of traits. Understanding the genome of different creatures and their capacity to mate has practical applications. If you want to understand what something is as itself, to somehow approach its reality, what God sees, one has to open one’s heart and mind. Love is the Truth.

And that is one of the biggest problem I have had with the theory of evolution.Everything is known. No matter what the question, there is always some kind of explanation.
Far-fetched as it may be, there is always something.

No one ever steps up to the plate and says, I do not know.

Always doubt it when someone claims all the answers. And here, that is the claim.

It has to be. It must be. No tiny sliver of doubt can be allowed to grow. Perhaps: It explains everything and nothing at the same time. Studying old bones is interesting, but what does that have to do with “evolution”? Sure, creatures, lived, died and went extinct. That’s still happening today. Biologists are getting zero guidance from evolution. It’s still trial and error.

We can learn from later generations about the earlier generations. How many eyes did your great^9-grandfather have, despite your never having met him?

rossum

One would think you no longer want to talk about the crayfish.

I want to talk about it.What did this creature evolve from? It needs it’s hard shell and claws to protect itself and feed.What was this animal using while it was waiting millions of years for evolution to make it fit for survival ?

It has to be. It must be. No tiny sliver of doubt can be allowed to grow. Perhaps: It explains everything and nothing at the same time. Studying old bones is interesting, but what does that have to do with “evolution”? Sure, creatures, lived, died and went extinct. That’s still happening today. Biologists are getting zero guidance from evolution. It’s still trial and error.

Many articles appeal to it as the standard which validates the findings. It is taken as a truth by which everything else is judged to be pseudoscience. But research is whittling away at the assumptions, and the implications of conclusions as those published in Nature Reviews Genetics that speciation appears to occur through gene deletion, which common sense in fact would dictate, are ignored.

The marble crayfish is a mutant slough crayfish. It has an extra set of chromosomes that allows some eggs to grow without fertilization because there are already a pair in the egg before fertilization. They are all female and are more susceptible to genetic mutations, so the “species” has limited survivability. This is because sexual reproduction protects against the impact of such genetic disorders. I don’t understand why anyone can imagine defects in gene replication and reproduction are behind the diversity in life that has resulted in human beings keeping crayfish in their aquariums.

The marble crayfish is a mutant slough crayfish. It has an extra set of chromosomes that allows some eggs to grow without fertilization because there are already a pair in the egg before fertilization. They are all female and are more susceptible to genetic mutations, so the “species” has limited survivability. This is because sexual reproduction protects against the impact of such genetic disorders. I don’t understand why anyone can imagine defects in gene replication and reproduction are behind the diversity in life that has resulted in human beings keeping crayfish in their aquariums.

This is the essence of it: simple people demand that God be as simple as they are. But this means that they are not actually worshiping a real Creator God-- who must necessarily be very complex indeed. They are worshiping their own idea of what God should be.

In other words, if you are against the observable facts, you are also guilty of a kind of idolatry-- the worship of a man-made myth rather than of the actual force from which everything comes, which influences and maintains everything, and which is much greater than any man’s imagination, or even any book that man might choose to print.

There’s real irony in these guys, who see it as an act of faith to very deliberately remain as ignorant as possible, even though all knowledge is necessarily about God’s creation.

Again, for the scientist Evolution is purely a biological theorem. It takes over organic life on this planet as a going concern and tries to explain certain changes within that field. It makes no cosmic statements, no metaphysical statements, no eschatological statements. Granted that we now have minds we can trust, granted that organic life came to exist, it tries to explain, say, how a species that once had wings came to lose them. It explains this by the negative effect of environment operating on small variations. It does not in itself explain the origin of organic life, nor of the variations, nor does it discuss the origin and validity of reason. It may well tell you how the brain, through which reason now operates, arose, but that is a different matter. Still less does it even attempt to tell you how the universe as a whole arose, or what it is, or whither it is tending. But the Myth knows none of these reticences. Having first turned what was a theory of change into a theory of improvement, it then makes this a cosmic theory. Not merely terrestrial organisms but everything is moving ‘upwards and onwards’. Reason has ‘evolved’ out of instinct, virtue out of complexes, poetry out of erotic howls and grunts, civilization out of savagery, the organic out of the inorganic, the solar system out of some sidereal soup or traffic block. And conversely, reason, virtue, art and civilization as we now know them are only the crude or embryonic beginnings of far better things–perhaps Deity itself–in the remote future. For in the Myth, ‘Evolution’ (as the Myth understands it) is the formula for all existence. To exist means to be moving from the status of ‘almost zero’ to the status of ‘almost infinity’. To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn to order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. And with this we reach the full-blown Myth. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.

There are some mistakes which humanity has made and repeated so often that there is now really no excuse for making them again. One of these is the injustice which every age does its predecessor; for instance, the ignorant contempt with which the...

To reach the positions held by the real scientists — which are then taken over by the Myth —you must — in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true.If my own mind is a product of the irrational — if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel — how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution? They say in effect ‘I will prove that what you call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity which results from bio-chemistry which results from physics.’ But this is the same as saying: ‘I will prove that proofs are irrational’: more succinctly, ‘I will prove that there are no proofs’. The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one’s suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is compelled to reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. That it has embedded in it many true particulars I do not doubt: but in its entirety, it simply will not do. Whatever the real universe may turn out to be, it can’t be like that.